Comment by polka_haunts_us

From my perspective last year as a first time participant in other people's open source projects, I don't think I would've made any of the contributions I did without Hacktoberfest.

Projects tagged with the Hacktoberfest tag tended to signal either projects that were both active and had low barriers of entry for newbies, or weird mechanical turk-esque spam. While the latter is unfortunate, the former isn't nearly as easy to find as it should be the other 11 months of the year.